Astronauts are heading to the moon for the first time in more than 50 years, after a Nasa rocket successfully blasted off from Florida last night. The Artemis II mission will carry the crew of four on a 10-day journey around the moon and back, hopefully paving the way for future expeditions to the lunar surface and beyond. “We have a beautiful moonrise,” said mission commander Reid Wiseman shortly after the launch. “We’re heading right at it.” Donald Trump promised to hit Iran “extremely hard” over the coming weeks, in a primetime TV speech that dampened hopes of an imminent end to the conflict. The US president, who claimed yesterday he was considering pulling the US out of Nato, also said allies would have to “take the lead” in reopening the Strait of Hormuz. Cranes are continuing their remarkable comeback from extinction in the UK. Britain’s tallest bird disappeared around four centuries ago but wild recolonisation, backed up by wetland habitat protection, has seen numbers recover. Last year a record 87 pairs raised 37 young, bringing the total population to about 250.

It’s not just the Iran war that is going badly for Donald Trump, says Edward Luce in the FT. Domestic advisers like White House chief of staff Susie Wiles are “tearing their hair out” trying to schedule events in which the president can talk about his plans to lower the cost of living, only for events in the Middle East to make a nonsense of their efforts. And the truth is that even if Trump declared unilateral victory in the Gulf, he would still have less power over inflation than the Iranians do. Tehran has discovered it can “induce Taco” (“Trump always chickens out”) with its chokehold on global oil and gas markets, just as the Chinese discovered last year with rare earths.

It’s now common in Washington to speculate that Trump may try to cancel the midterms, but there’s little chance that’ll happen. Not once since the first US election in 1789 has a nationwide election been cancelled and, if Trump tried, there’s every reason to believe the courts would stop him. Until recently, he could at least bank on the conservative-leaning Supreme Court to uphold his agenda, but now they have started to push back: the justices struck down his main tariffs in February and look likely to reject his attempt to end birthright citizenship – a “double whammy” hitting two of the president’s four biggest political touchstones. The third was to avoid “stupid, senseless wars” in the Middle East. As for the fourth – the “war on woke” – that may have worked “a little too well”. In 2024, psephologists talked of a “realignment” in which Trump’s MAGA coalition included a “multiracial working-class base” who were sick of progressives. “There is no longer such talk.”

📉😬 The latest YouGov polling shows that Trump’s net approval has fallen to -23 percentage points, says The Economist. That’s worse than his previous low of -21, in 2017, and roughly matches Joe Biden’s nadir after his terrible presidential debate performance in 2024, “when many Americans concluded he was unfit for office”.

Keir Starmer likes to post on social media about his “number one priority”, says Private Eye. But he can’t seem to decide what that priority is. In his 2024 election campaign he said it was “wealth creation”. Over the course of August last year he cited two: making sure “our communities are safe”, and putting an end to people trafficking. On Boxing Day he said securing the repatriation of British-Egyptian activist Alaa Abd El Fattah had been a “top priority” since he came into office. In February this year it was tackling the cost of living. And last month he said protecting British lives “is, and always will be, my number one priority”.

The end of litter is finally nigh, says Sean Thomas in The Spectator, thanks to massive advances in robotics. Finland’s Trombia Free autonomous street sweeper (pictured) is already operating in Helsinki, using 90% less energy and 100% less manpower than conventional sweepers; Guangzhou in China plans 1,000 “unmanned cleaning units” by next year; and Washington State is testing drones that can detect graffiti with AI and then spray it away. With these immensely strong, tireless automatons quietly toiling 24/7, even London’s army of dedicated chicken box and vape discarders won’t be able to keep up. Heaven.

For all the fretting about the death of Hollywood, says Roy Price in The New York Times, the latest evidence suggests that people know exactly where their local cinema is, just as long as they’re given films they actually want to see. Project Hail Mary, a fun sci fi adventure starring Ryan Gosling, took a whopping $80m at the US box office last week, the biggest opening for an original movie since Oppenheimer. It’s not alone: this year’s box office take is up a robust 20%, driven by the latest Avatar movie, Sydney Sweeney’s sexy thriller The Housemaid, Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights and others. The reason? “Movies are starting to feel fun again.”

Films have eras: there were the musicals of the 1950s and 1960s; then the weighty “cinematic 1970s”; the blockbuster 1980s; and the more auteur-ish 1990s. The most recent era, which began with Donald Trump’s election win in 2016 and went into hyperdrive in 2020, was one in which “political and social messaging” were what mattered most in Hollywood. Sex, erotic thrillers and comedies were out; romcoms “essentially disappeared”. You could make Oscar-bait like Nomadland, but championing the pure ribaldry of something like Bridesmaids was suddenly unthinkable. The “Dionysian elements” of popular entertainment – “irreverence, sexual frankness and broad, even scatological humour” – were cast aside as the industry decided its job was to “correct historic wrongs and resist current ones”. And guess what? Audiences hated it. Thankfully, studio bosses have finally noticed. Hollywood was built on entertainment, on making gloriously fun, diverting films full of sexy people like Gosling and Sweeney. Thank God it’s back.

Some years ago, says Jeremy Dicker in International Intrigue, I spent a day touring America’s space facilities. At Elon Musk’s SpaceX, I watched a “mullet-clad male in jorts” aggressively angle-grinding what looked like “alien spaceship parts”, as Bruce Springsteen blasted out beneath an enormous American flag. Later, at a major defence contractor, I saw two clean-cut nerds in pristine lab coats solemnly examine a single widget, clipboards in hand. Finally, at Nasa’s famous Jet Propulsion Laboratory, I received a polite PowerPoint presentation in a windowless conference room. Three very different cultures, working to three very different rhythms – which have successfully pulled together to “get us back to the moon”.

Iran’s attacks have so severely damaged American military bases in the Middle East, say Helene Cooper and Eric Schmitt in The New York Times, that top brass have ordered soldiers – apart from fighter pilots and their crews – to relocate to hotels and off-base office spaces. This means that thousands of frontline soldiers are, in effect, fighting a war while WFH.

It’s the world’s largest chocolate Mini Egg, says Susie Rack in BBC News, created for Easter at Cadbury World in Birmingham. The 55kg, 70cm-tall Bournville behemoth – which will be on display for two weeks from Monday – took a team of three specialist chocolatiers two days to craft. The pink sugar shell was made first, then slowly filled with melted milk chocolate. The idea for the Mega Mini Egg came about simply enough, says top confectioner Claire Fielding: last year’s gigantic Creme Egg was such a hit, fans wrote in to ask for a Mini Egg equivalent. So they made one.